Study: VoIP and UC to Rebound in 2010

Market research firm Infonetics Research has published three Voice over IP and unified communications reports, finding that while 'the enterprise telephony market was hit hard in 2009 due to the recession," things are looking better.

Based on the latest quarterly shipment figures and results from their March 2010 survey of North American enterprises about IP-PBX spending, "it appears that the bleeding has stopped and 2010 promises to be a better year, good news for vendors and service providers alike,' notes Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data at Infonetics Research:

'From our IP-PBX survey, it appears that businesses are increasingly embracing a hosted services model, as their capacity needs will depend on how robust the economic recovery is, and hosted services allow them to more easily ramp their capacity needs up and down without a huge cash layout for equipment.'

Earlier this week, TMC had the news that Nextiva, a SaaS provider of business communication services, launched NextivaOffice.com, a site providing businesses with more information on Nextiva's hosted phone systems.

The NextivaOffice.com site provides small businesses with more information on Nextiva's hosted phone systems, including many enterprise-class features, for thousands of dollars less per year than the 'traditional' phone company, company officials say.

Diane Myers, directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, said VoIP services sold to the residential/SOHO market "still make up the lion's share, about three-quarters, of total VoIP service revenue."

She noted that the market saw a pickup in business VoIP service revenue growth in late 2009, and that "service providers report that they are seeing increasing interest in hosted VoIP services across all sizes of businesses," including large enterprises.

"We expect this trend to continue as more companies turn to hosted services for their voice needs, with business VoIP services making up almost a third of all VoIP service revenue by 2014,' she said.

Businesses expect to increase their phone extensions at a slightly higher-than-normal growth rate over the next 2 years - fifteen percent, the study said - which it attributed to hiring and growing following the recession.